making much of a little

The end of the year draws near ...

For the last five years I've forced myself to lock into a cycle of activity that sees me trying to get the NEXT year in train in relation to publishing. Given the long cycle from submission to publication, it is highly likely that nothing sent in later than November has a hope in hell of getting publishing in the following year (and sometimes not even in the year following that). So, I am for a flurry of activity around this time of year.

With that in mind, I was looking over conference papers for this year and came across the one I presented in AERA in New Orleans, back in April. I was actually surprised by the finished quality of the paper and realised that I could submit it to a journal without a lot of reworking. As luck would have it, earlier in the week I had printed out some blurb about a journal article I wanted to read. THis morning I found that print out and noticed that the article was from the Journal of Research in Childhood Education. I think it would be a perfect place to submit my article. So this evening I will work on the paper and then submit it.

the chapter

It was with some relief that I met my deadline yesterday for delivery of a book chapter. I don't like missing deadlines and try to avoid doing that wherever possible. So, I had the chapter together in draft form by around Wednesday and then took to some editing up until yesterday. The chapter does need some more work but hopefully I will get a chance after the reviews come in (fingers crossed).

This is the first time that I have seriously written about young children's disputes so I needed to (again) get on top of a body of literature that I wasn't all that familiar with and of course I also needed to do my own analysis. I liked doing the analysis a lot - for some reason it seemed more straight forward than some of the analysis I've needed to do in the last few years.

I also have a student who is now analysing disputes in her data so my own work with dovetail nicely with her supervision. The student is also examining talk in the playing of a game, as I did, so lots of connections and flow on from the work I've done in the last month on the chapter.

I've kept files as the work progressed and it is really interesting to see the very first rough transcript and annotations that I made on that using Maynard's work to help me initially identify some of the sequences. I also presented a paper on that developing analysis when I was in Freibourg in July. My work moved on again with the actual development of the chapter and, hopefully, will receive some good reviews that will help me refine it just that little bit further.

Now I'm going to switch to reading about literacy and new media.

the fellowship

Since July of this year, I have been on a research fellowship at RIPPLE. It has been a marvellous opportunity to devote sustained time to my research work. So, apart from writing I've also been able to do quite a bit of reading. This appears like a luxury but will stand me in good stead for the next couple of years of research. It is amazing how quickly you can get out of touch with certain bodies of literature. For me, there was the need to get stuck into literature on CA. Most recently that has been in relation to work on young children's disputes. I like the work a lot and think that I will possibly write some more in this area down the track. Meanwhile I am busy finishing my chapter titled:

When ‘Yes’ turns to ‘No’: Young children’s disputes during computer game playing in the home

I have a number of disputes between children during use of the computer but this is the first analysis of them that I have done. As usual, I have used single case analysis and produced a detailed analysis of a long spate of talk. At the moment the draft suggests that it is still a challenging read because of the length. So, I am working on that today. Associated literature that I have really enjoyed reading?

Church, A. (2009). Preference organization and peer disputes: How young children resolve conflicts. Surrey, Eng: Ashgate.

Hester, S., & Hester, S. (2010). Conversational actions and category relations: An analysis of a children’s argument. Discourse Studies, 12(1), 33-48.

Vuchinich, S. (1990). The sequential organization of closing in verbal family conflict. In A. D. Grimshaw (Ed.), Conflict talk (pp. 111-138). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.